Alex Palmieri – News Writer
Eduroam, education roaming, is the new wifi that is on the campus of SCSU. Its purpose is to be faster and more efficient.
Raymond Kellogg, director of network services, said the network is up to date and its speed on the network overall has improved. He said a student’s credentials they use to get on the network at Southern will work if they go to UCONN or any CSU.
“The speed on the network has been improved tremendously because of the brand new network,” said Kellogg. “We just spent 17 months installing the core network, the distribution, the brand new network. The wireless network is 700 brand new access points deployed all over campus.”
Jonathan Garbutt, enterprise infrastructure manager, said the switch from SCSU Internet to Eduroam is not going to make Eduroam faster. He said the fact of the matter is once the network upgrade was applied, the wireless became faster at that point.
“Then from that point,” said Garbutt, “down the road, we decided to migrate to Eduroam.”
Kellogg said it was CIO Robert Rennie’s request to implement the new network. He said there has been no feedback from students or faculty yet up to this point. Since Kellogg said the speed will be more efficient, it will be a good upgrade to the university.
“It was a part of a group of projects to completely upgrade the network wired in wireless so we can then deploy unified communications,” said Kellogg.
There have been no complaints to this point about the quality of the coverage or the speed. But Garbutt said when the old wireless network is compared to the new one, it is a night and day comparison and one that will be noticed rather quickly.
“The signal strengths should be dramatically improved across areas of the campus,” said Garbutt. “The speed should be noticeably faster as well.”
After the instillation of the new wireless network, Kellogg said they immediately had their Cisco vendors do a post installation survey by two of their engineers.
“They went around to every access point and did a sight survey to be sure the signal strength saturated the space,” said Kellogg. “We’re very confident that the wireless network is as up to date and high tech as possible.”
Kiersten Simon, a senior geography major with a concentration in environmental sustainability, said it can be tricky to log on to the new wifi, but once she is logged on, she said the speed is very fast.
“I’m automatically logged on which is great,” said Simon. “Except sometimes I have to go and set my phone up to connect to it because it won’t automatically do that. But I do not have to sign in again.”
This new wifi is one that will soon be taking over the SCSU Internet. With the upgrade, Garbutt said it can be a very good step in the right direction.
“One of the greatest things about Eduroam is,” said Garbutt, “in most cases, you should be able to walk on campus of a participating institution and you automatically connect to Eduroam. No need for requesting a guest account or anything like that.”